Just read Jason O’Grady’s blog over on ZDNet and it’s quite eye-opening… one thing leapt out:
“Wireless syncing. iPhone can only be synced with a cable and can’t be synced via WiFi or Bluetooth. This is unacceptable. iPhone has three radios and should be able to be synced with all three. WiFi and BT minimally, then OTA to Dot-Mac for bonus points.”
So the device won’t be able to sync with Exchange natively and unless Apple changes the stance of not allowing 3rd party applications (another strange decision), presumably precluding a 3rd party ISV from building an ActiveSync client (such as DataViz RoadSync which is available for loads of other devices). Maybe even RIM would have wanted to build a Blackberry Connect client for the device, but again, might be unable to…
Sounds like the iPhone v1 will be pretty limited in terms of competition with other smart devices – basically a music player which can do a bit of web surfing and make and receive phone calls.
Who knows, maybe that’s what the masses actually want – maybe smartphones and connected PDAs are too complex for the average user on the street – but it could be some future iteration of the iPhone which expands on the basics which the v1 device establishes. It’ll be interesting to try out the iPhone when it comes out… no doubt, it’ll sell shed loads and if the UI is as good as the hype suggests, it could force everyone else to concentrate on doing a few things well, and carefully adding more functionality gradually.
Related reading:
Apple iPhone for now ignoring synch
